A week into Linked In

A customer recently sent me an email to join linked in, a social networking "business" site. It seems myspace is more for music fans, facebook for college or recent graduates where linked in is more for professionals.
The differences are certainly there in the UI. For instance, in facebook, you can say if a linked friend "hooked up" with you whereas there is no option for this in linked in. I guess it still goes on, but it is not something you would publish as it has little business benefit and does not make you look very professional.
I was surprised how many IBM'ers were already on the network and thank those who have linked to me. The purpose is to find connections, so I thought I would give it a little test.
The test worked. I have managed to find one lost friend through our xhtml developer. I worked with David Wyss for a while around the QuickPlace redbook and he had seemingly vanished. I had asked a few common contacts (IBM) what happened to him but they didn't know. When I searched through linked in, it found a connection through Australia (where I was looking in Switzerland) and it came through a non-IBM source (where I looked through IBM'ers). So, it seems we were not very far from each other after all - there was always 2 degrees of separation all this time and we just didn't know.

Change custom field names in QuickPlace

If you have a custom form in quickplace and then change a field name, it will not go through and update all the pages that have been created by this form.
So, for instance, if you create a form that has a field called "categories" and want to change it to "category", here is an agent that will loop through all the documents in this room and all its inner rooms using recursion.

'category correction:

Option Public
Option Declare

Dim server As String
Dim placename As String
Dim s As notessession
Sub fixcategory(roompath)
Dim roomdb As NotesDatabase
Dim roomview As notesview

Set roomdb = s.GetDatabase(server, roompath)
If roomdb.IsOpen = False Then
Call roomdb.Open(server, roompath)
End If


Dim roomindex As notesview
Set roomindex = roomdb.GetView("System\Index")
Dim page As notesdocument

Set page = roomindex.GetFirstDocument

While Not(page Is Nothing)
'Work through all documents
page.c_category = page.GetItemValue("c_categories")

Call page.Save(True,False)
Set page = roomindex.GetNextDocument(page)
Wend

Set roomview = roomdb.GetView("System\Subrooms")
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Set doc = roomview.GetFirstDocument
While Not (doc Is Nothing)
Dim iroomtitle As String
Dim iroomfile As String

iroomtitle = doc.GetItemValue("h_Name")(0)
iroomfile = doc.GetItemValue("h_LocDbName")(0)

Print "Working on: " + iroomfile
Call fixcategory("quickplace/"+placename+"/" + iroomfile)

Set doc = roomview.GetNextDocument(doc)
Wend
End Sub
Sub Initialize
Set s = New notessession
placename = "test_place" 'Your place name
server = "www/projectlounge" 'Your server name

Print "Starting in a room"
'you can change this to main.nsf if you need
Call fixcategory("quickplace/"+placename+"/PageLibrary85257279005D300B.nsf")
End Sub




Rediscovering an ibm.com treasure

While digging up an old email from 2004 for someone, I found that my signature once contained a link to the IBM culture clash web site.
It does have some good information and for those that have traveled to some of these countries, it certainly can bring back some memories.